Q:
What do you recommend to ensure that demand generation and social promotions are aligned, and effective?
A:
Hi Vince,
Thank you for the question, let's actually break these into two parts: how to make sure these efforts are aligned and how to make these efforts are effective.
For efforts to be aligned on any campaign, it comes down to having an integrated strategy and plan. Creating integrated campaigns should be relatively easy if your company has weekly
intra-departmental meetings where everyone shares upcoming campaign plans and objectives. If your company does not have this type of meeting, I recommend championing the effort to create one. During these meetings, it is important to cover the goals of the campaign, the tactics, and the way you will measure success, as well as, open up the conversation to generate feedback from the other teams. Often times, other channel managers will have invaluable input that allows a more aligned approach -- they just need the space to contribute.
The
second question isn't quite so simple to solve. Effectiveness isn't
something you can learn how to do once and then repeat forever in the
future. It is an ongoing process with changing variables and the results are often challenging to comparle. I
recommend using a system to set goals, measure results, and gather insights. Once you go through this process you will be able to use your insights to make assumptions, for your next campaign. By repeating this process, you will identify insights and correlating
triggers for your specific audience and be able to improve effectiveness campaign-over-campaign.
A few extra tips and tricks learned over time:
- Be clear on your goals for your campaign
- Create a multi-channel communication plan for your promotion
- Strategically plan out the timeline of each communication for maximum exposure
- Create separate bit.ly links for each communication so you can see which effort drives the most traffic
- Ensure your landing page is designed for conversion (whether the goal is to create a lead or drive a sale)
- Pour over your data for insights
I hope this is helpful!
I would love to hear how other teams are making sure their marketing efforts are aligned for maximum effectiveness in the comments below.
Please, submit any questions to me on Twitter or through my contact page, and be sure to let me know if you want your question to be anonymous.
By Gretchen Fox, Social Architect at grtchnfx
